Our global “new normal” appears to be a return to solving for basics—food, energy, and security— problems our global systems were thought to be on a trajectory to solve. How did we get here—and how can we move forward?
A return to old risks against a backdrop of new concerns
Against a backdrop of the persistent health and economic overhang of a global pandemic and a war in Europe, as 2023 begins, the world is facing a set of risks that feel both wholly new and eerily familiar. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023, the world’s top current risks are energy, food, inflation, and the overall cost of living crisis. Over the next two years, the cost-of-living crisis remains the number one threat, followed by natural disasters and trade and technology wars.
Over the next 10 years however, lack of climate mitigation and climate adaptation lead, with biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, are viewed as one of the most rapidly deteriorating global risks over the next decade. Geoeconomic confrontation, erosion of social cohesion and societal polarization, widespread cybercrime and cyber insecurity, and large-scale involuntary migration all feature in the top 10 risks over the next 10 years.
The last khbrknews income disparity featured among the top concerns was in 2013, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Energy price volatility was among the top 10 in 2012, alongside food crises. But the combination of societal, technological, economic, environmental, and geopolitical risks we face today is unique.
On the one hand, there is a return of “older” risks—similar to the low-growth, high inflation, volatile energy, and low investment era of the 1970s against the backdrop of the Cold War— that are understood historically but experienced by few in the current generations of business…
